Empower Guatemalan Families With Food & Nutrition

Fighting Malnutrition in Rural Guatemala continues to expand to additional villages in the region, so more families are participating, and their friends, family members and neighbors are being exposed to ideas and skills they can use to ensure that their families have enough to eat, and that each meal has improved nutritional content.

We’re also introducing a new concept, the Casa-Granja, or Household Farm, which is designed to bring even more food and nutrition to families, and also offer opportunities for additional income, to further stabilize and improve the household economy. 

In many rural communities, the pattern is for a family to have a residential location in the village and further away, a larger “parcela” where a cash crop is farmed (usually by the men.)  Household sites vary quite a lot in size and shape, but the casa-granja concept can be applied very flexibly to accommodate both the available space and the family’s needs and interests.

The casa-granja is an organized method of integrating vegetable, fruit and animal production in a compact space, with the left-overs and by-products of each supporting the production needs of the other.  Meanwhile, the family diet is enriched with eggs, meat, fish and high-nutrition greens, as well as onions, chile peppers and other tasty condiment plants. 

While many families have had a few chickens or a fruit tree for years, organizing the various components of food production into an integrated system is a new concept for families and means learning new ways of doing things.  

• Keeping the chickens in coops means you get more eggs, and the manure can be collected for composting and fertilizing the garden. 
• Gardens need a simple home-made fence for protection from pets or any "free-ranging" neighborhood animals. 
• Garden discards and kitchen scraps can be fed to fish or animals, or can be composted to enrich garden soil.
• "Enriched" fish water fertilizes and irrigates gardens.

The Seeds for a Future team provides the basic conceptual knowledge and ideas, and helps customize these for each family.  Then, most important, we follow up with regular group meetings and weekly household visits for several months, to provide coaching and follow-up as well as printed materials for the family to keep and refer to.

Our coaching and knowledge-sharing includes the environment (separation and recycling of household waste); the importance of good nutrition and what foods are rich in nutrients; kitchen hygiene and clean water; and especially, how to use the nutritious foods to enhance familiar recipes or prepare new dishes to please their families.  Working together, our staff and the women participants have created several booklets of recipes to share with one another.

This is the kind of exciting work your earlier contribution helped us to achieve.  

PLEASE RENEW YOUR SUPPORT NOW TO HELP RURAL GUATEMALA FAMILIES SUCCEED IN THE FIGHT AGAINST MALNUTRITION.  Click the GIVE NOW button below, share this report with your friends and colleagues and follow us on our Facebook page.

Greetings and welcome to our first report for 2016.

The fight against malnutrition via family gardens is going well and participating families are all able to harvest nutritious greens and other nutritious vegetables for their meals.

A very important factor in the success of a home garden is the quality of the soil.  Our team has worked diligently with each family to ensure that their soil beds are well-prepared, so the the nutritious food plants will be “happy” -- growing and producing well.  Good soil for growing is full of nutrients, with a loose texture that fosters root development, and compost is the key!

Each participating family is encouraged to create a composting spot, and one of the simplest ways to do this is by using old tires.  A family can have as many as they have space for, and since the amount of compost in each tire is modest, it’s easy for any family member to mix and rotate the contents to ensure thorough decomposition.

What could be better?!  Putting discarded tires to use means fewer in the environment.  In addition, most rural areas in Guatemala have limited means of dealing with household wastes, and garbage is often burned.  Composting kitchen and garden scraps reduces this type of contamination.  Old tires + kitchen scraps and other organic waste = a quick route to rich compost that means better garden results, and a healthier environment!  And better garden results not only mean more and more nutritious food, the satisfaction and pride families feel from a successful and productive garden make them more likely to continue growing their own healthy food.

We appreciate your support for this important effort to combat the tragedy of malnutrition.  A contribution of any amount will help us reach needy families with the training and support they need to plant and maintain family home gardens that feature high-nutrition greens and vegetables.  The skills learned through our training will last a lifetime and will be shared throughout the community, as our families help others learn how to do the same. The family gardens program continues to produce wonderful results in fighting malnutrition and we thank you deeply for your caring and for your support.